Introduction: Migrant worlds, material cultures

While much scholarly work exists on both migration and material culture, there is remarkably little literature explicitly concerned with how these areas of study converge. In this introduction we suggest a number of points of departure for the exploration of the relationships between 'migrant worlds' and 'material cultures' and we link these points with the contributions to this Special Issue. We hope thereby to shift the theoretical framing of migrancy into some areas of concern that have been of long-standing importance within anthropology (the gift, temporality, translation), but have not necessarily been those raised most frequently in relation to migration studies.